The Capitals: Tokyo and Tehran take women's rights in contrasting directions

Diversity of viewpoints spurs innovation, a groundbreaking Harvard research in 2013 had concluded. Since then, reports as well as anecdotal insights have pointed out to a pattern of international investors rejecting the composition of proposed directors at shareholders' meetings that do not include women.

But that's just one small part of the world where equal opportunities for all have emerged as one defining circle in a range of concentric circles of asocial sphere.

In many parts of the world, women continue to struggle for equal opportunities.

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This week two vastly different stories from two different capitals of the world underscored the growing gap between striving towards ideal and runningaway from the same on the front of women's rights.

Tokyo, Japan

This photo taken on December 17, 2022 shows people walking past autumn leaves along a tree-lined street at the centre of the Hongo campus at the University of Tokyo, also known as Todai, in Tokyo | AFP

The education board of Japanese capitalannouncedscrapping of its gender quota for all admissions of full-time public high school students.

The new rules will come in effect starting from the spring of 2024.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education had beenthe last board in Japan with a quota for ensuring an equal gender ratio for men and women.

Tokyo, like the rest of prefectures in Japan, will begin passing the individuals based on grades-based ranking. Earlier, the qualification criteria for men and women was being criticised due to significant gap of marks required for people of two genders.

The move is deemed as a reflection of a growing awareness of sexual diversity in Japan. This is because, to avail the benefits of gender quota, one had to specify their gender.

Transgender or nonbinary people in Japan long complained of psychological distress when forced to specify a gender they did not identify with.

Tehran, Iran

A protester holds a portrait of Mahsa Amini during a demonstration in her support in front of the Iranian embassy in Brussels | AFP

A 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, originally from Iran's Kurdistan province,was coming out of a metro station in Tehran in September 2023 when she was detained by country's morality police, who accused her of violating country's mandatory hijab rules.

Amini was put in a van and taken to a so-called re-education centre where women are "trained" to dress properly.

Amini was seen collapsing in that government facility, following which she died at a hospital days later.

Her parents countered the account of authorities who claimed that she died of a pre-existing condition and cited their daughter's previously non-existent head injury as sign of torture they said Amini faced in detention.

From a small protest right in front of the Tehran hospital where she breathed last, the public outrage on Mahsa Amini's custodial death snowballed into the biggest-ever challenge for country's rulers since the Islamic revolution of 1979. Protests spread across towns and cities of the nation, where people demanded scrapping of country's mandatory hijab rules and called for the ouster of the Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei

The street protests gradually died down earlier this year after ruthless repression on protesters.Rights organisations say more than 500 people were killed, including at least 70 minors while tens of thousands were detained in prisons across Iran.

A number of journalists remain imprisoned till date.

This week, as the world marked one year of Mahsa Amini's custodial death, the Kurdistan Human Rights Networksaidthat female inmates on held protests at the Qarchak prison, about 62 km from Tehran.

The Iran Revolutionary Guards Corpsmeanwhile announced that a dual national was arrested over "attempts to organise riots and vandalism" in Karaj city west of the capital Tehran.

The authorities alsoAmini's family from holding a ceremony to commemorate the first anniversary of her death, confining her father under "house arrest", rights groups said.

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